On 9 Nov 2011, at 14:34, Steve wrote:
My question is fairly straightforward - If I want to render a pdf in
a browser, should I create a new Catalyst View?
Yes. In a perfect world, you'd just say $c->stash( current_view =>
'PDF' ) (and set a filename?) to make a pdf...
The background on this is that we think that rather than rendering
an HTML version of these reports, and subsequently converting them
to pdf, just create the pdf on the fly and render it in the browser.
Extra credit for recommendations on pdf tools for this type of
thing. We've looked at PDF::Create, PDF::API2, PDF::Reuse, and also
Prince (if we decide to convert from HTML).
Depends how dirty you want to be :_)
Doing something 'proper' with one of these (or also, take your XHTML,
apply XSLT => docbook, then make a pdf?) totally works, and if you're
prepared to put the effort in, you can make really nice documents..
But _if_ you can deal with something ugly but workable - then just
subclass your HTML view, after process write $c->req->body out to a
tempfile and run html2ps | ps2pdf on it! (Then read that back in and
replace the body) This is really dirty (and kinda slow for big pages),
but with a few appropriate options and some CSS to cut out the bits
that shouldn't be in the pdf - it works well..
I use this technique for all of our invoices, as I don't really care
how they look :)
Cheers
t0m
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